Nazis Were Given ‘Safe Haven’ in U.S., Report Says

[Dave Monroe]

Nazis Were Given ‘Safe Haven’ in U.S., Report Says
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
Published: November 13, 2010


WASHINGTON — A secret history of the United States government’s
Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials
created a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their
collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes,
often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad.

600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret
for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the
most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades.

[...]

The report also examines the case of Arthur L. Rudolph, a Nazi
scientist who ran the Mittelwerk munitions factory. He was brought to
the United States in 1945 for his rocket-making expertise under
Operation Paperclip, an American program that recruited scientists who
had worked in Nazi Germany. (Rudolph has been honored by NASA and is
credited as the father of the Saturn V rocket.)

The report cites a 1949 memo from the Justice Department’s No. 2
official urging immigration officers to let Rudolph back in the
country after a stay in Mexico, saying that a failure to do so “would
be to the detriment of the national interest.”

Justice Department investigators later found evidence that Rudolph was
much more actively involved in exploiting slave laborers at Mittelwerk
than he or American intelligence officials had acknowledged, the
report says.

Some intelligence officials objected when the Justice Department
sought to deport him in 1983, but the O.S.I. considered the
deportation of someone of Rudolph’s prominence as an affirmation of
“the depth of the government’s commitment to the Nazi prosecution
program,” according to internal memos.

[...]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/us/14nazis.html